themselves to be our superiors in the matter of gentle breeding. As
Col. T.W. Higginson has phrased it, they think that "the English
nation has truthfulness enough for a whole continent, and almost too
much for an island." They think that a line might be drawn somewhere
between dissembling our love and kicking them downstairs. They also
object to our use of such terms as "beastly," "stinking," and "rot;"
and we must admit that they do so with justice, while we cannot assoil
them altogether of the opposite tendency of a prim prudishness in the
avoidance of certain natural and necessary words. For myself I
unfeignedly admire the delicacy which leads to a certain parsimony in
the use of words like "perspiration," "cleaning one's self," and so
on. And, however much we may laugh at the class that insists upon the
name of "help" instead of "servant," we cannot but respect the class
which yields to the demand and looks with horror on the English slang
word "slavey."

On the other hand there are certain little personal habits, such as
the public use of the toothpick, and what Mr. Morley Roberts calls the
modern form of [Greek: kottabos], which I think often find themselves
in better company in America than in England. Still I desire to speak
here with all due diffidence. I remember when I pointed out to a
Boston girl that an American actor in a piece before us, representing
high life in London, was committing a gross solecism in moistening his
pencil in his mouth before adding his address to his visiting card,
she trumped my criticism at once by the information that a
distinguished English journalist, with a handle to his name, who
recently made a successful lecturing tour in the United States,
openly and deliberately moistened his thumb in the same ingenuous
fashion to aid him in turning over the leaves of his manuscript.